


Scans And Emotions

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [129]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Psi Corps, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 06:24:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15600258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Is it true that strong emotions make it easier to scan someone?





	Scans And Emotions

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

[X-posted to Tumblr]

Canon mentions that strong emotions somehow make it easier to scan someone, but they never explain why this is or what’s going on.

To back up a bit here, for those of you who haven’t read it:

[What is a mid-level scan?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15011084)

[What is a deep scan?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15015632)

There is nothing inherent about a highly emotional state that makes someone “easier to scan.”

The person could, however, be in a highly emotional state and blooping their thoughts all over the place, however, either because he/she is a normal and normals tend to do that, or because he/she is a telepath and untrained, or because he/she is in such an emotional state (or physical distress) that he/she drops his/her mental blocks. This is different from “being easier to scan” - this is someone being in an extreme emotional state and broadcasting everything everywhere. No scan required.

What canon’s talking about is somewhat different. That’s not being in an emotional state _per se_ , but having strong emotions about a particular subject. I mention this in my essay above about so-called medium scans - if information that a telepath is looking for (however much they have to dig for it) is associated with strong emotions, then pinging for that will light up, so to speak. It indicates that there’s something there to find.

This is the difference between trying to find out “does X know this person Y?” if X casually knows Y, or if X has some really strong personal feelings about Y, good or bad. Pinging for Y in the second case will bring up a much clearer association.

Mundanes get mixed up all the time, though, and think that being (for example) angry in the presence of a telepath makes it easier for him or her to scan you. (Sheridan tells this to Ivanova, iirc, in one of the episodes where Bester is onboard.) No. If he wanted to scan her, it makes _no difference_. NO DIFFERENCE.

The difference is that a) she could be projecting all over the place, and he doesn’t have to scan her at all to see whatever it is, since she’s putting it in his face, or b) even if she’s not projecting all over the place, from surface thoughts, he’ll still be able to see she has strong feelings about whatever it is and thus, if he wanted to scan her, would know _where to look_ (since she just hung a neon sign on it).

And if she had strong feelings about the subject, even if she was thinking about nothing remotely related to that subject, if he scanned her deeply, again, the strong emotions would indicate where to look for something interesting.

(As he does with the miner who nearly kills Ysidra. Even though another Psi Cop has mostly cut out the memory of her excavating a Shadow ship on Mars, she still has really strong negative feelings about telepaths (personal history plus the usual bigotry), connected to strong negative feelings about the Psi Cop who did this to her (whom she does not remember!), and this leads him to the partially-but-not-entirely destroyed memory of the Shadow ship (which she _also_ has strong feelings about, because Those Things Are Scary).)

Those feelings didn’t make it “easier for him to scan her” - that part was the same (and easy as breathing). This made it easier for him _later on_ to sort through what he got from her memories, to find relevant information and to make sense of it.


End file.
